The Deeper Reason Why Skeptics Should Scoff at Christian Miracles

If you’re an atheist, ask yourself what it would take to convince you that Christians are onto something, that God and miracles exist, Jesus really was God, he rose from the grave, the Bible is essentially correct, and if we don’t trust in God’s plan, we’ll end up in Hell forever.

Be honest and imagine whether, regardless of the apparent miracle you might witness, you’d find yourself reaching for natural explanations.

David Hume thought you’d do just that because that’s what you should do. The evidence for natural explanations is vast, encompassing all the mundane experiences that many billions of people throughout the history of civilizations have had and that testify to a natural order. We’re talking about trillions of observations of causally ordered events that are, at best, ambiguous as evidence for religions, because they happen the same way for everyone, regardless of what we say, believe, or do. Gravity, space, and time work the same for everyone.

The scientific atheists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers have clashed on this question of whether anything could or should change a skeptic’s mind about religion. Coyne said that if Jesus descended from the clouds with Christian apostles and heavenly music, performed miracles for Myers and healed paraplegics, all captured on film, before returning to the sky, only stubbornness or some grudge against God would account for Myers’ continuing resistance to Christianity.

Myers replied that the question of God’s existence is too nebulous to be properly evaluated and that this miraculous evidence would be unfair because no religion predicts the exact miracles that allegedly occur or that show up in these thought experiments. Myers, for example, considered whether a 900-foot-tall Jesus appearing on Earth would convince him. The event would be extraordinary, but would it have much to do with Christianity?

The Christian writer Eric Sentell thinks, in effect, that Myers is closer to the truth or at least that there’s never a guarantee that any miracle would convince a skeptic. The reason is that we have free will. If Jesus showed up at the White House, says Sentell, people would be divided in their response. Some would celebrate the event while others would scoff.

And Sentell raises this scenario in reaction to the criticism that if the Christian God wanted to save everyone from hell, he could do so much more effectively than he allegedly did with the gambit of resurrecting Jesus. God could perform an unmistakable miracle for everyone simultaneously, once a generation, so no one would have any rational excuse for rejecting Christianity and the gospel.

Yet the more you’ve studied religions, the more these questions should strike you as crass. Recall, for example, Deuteronomy 6:16, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

But there’s a deeper problem, which Myers seems to dimly perceive, and it’s that Christianity specifically is a crass religion. Indeed, this is the world’s most vulgar, least coherent religion. If you’re a skeptic and you’re confused about what it would take for you to become a Christian, the primary source of that confusion is Christianity’s incoherence.

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In practice, of course, we know exactly what it would take to turn a nonbeliever into a religious person, because the main reason for the persistence of religions is clear: religions pass from generation to generation, by parents’ indoctrination of their children, and religions originated in the distant past when even the intellectual elites were much more naïve about the natural order. The religions that still flourish today originated from the childhood or adolescence of our species, as it were, when people were open to interpreting even mundane events as magical.

As to how non-Christian adults convert to Christianity, the answer is likewise plain. Setting aside superficial conversions, as in the case of someone going through the motions for the sake of his or her religious spouse, a real conversion to this religion that’s fixated on thought-control must approximate the act of the parents’ indoctrination of children. The adult’s mind must be wiped, and Christian content must overwrite the former thought patterns.

Typically, this happens when someone has nothing left to lose and “hits rock bottom,” such as when an alcoholic drunk-drives and submits to Alcoholics Anonymous, or when a banker loses his fortune on the stock market, or a soldier finds herself terrified in a foxhole. These desperate situations are like near-death experiences that can be just as personally transformational.

The mind is effectively rebooted, overcome by the situation’s strangeness, in which case the person can be implanted with a new worldview. This is a kind of brainwashing, the convert’s so-called rebirth that gives the game away: if a convert must be personally renewed, that means she must once again pass through a childlike state (as in Matt. 19:14), which means that those children who are raised as Christians “convert” in the same way: when they’re literally too young to know any better, their parents impose Christianity onto the impressionable minds.

There’s no mystery, then, as to what it would take to turn a skeptic into a Christian. It’s just that the process has nothing to do with convincing anyone. That’s not how Christians are generally made, so we can disregard the propaganda they spout after the fact, about Christianity’s rational merits. That apologetics rationalizes what happens to Christians when they embrace the faith and is supposed to make Christianity seem more amenable to the modern world.

The thought experiments about witnessed miracles and theistic evidence are academic. But they provide an opportunity to clarify the nature of this religion.

Notice that the canonical story of the physical resurrection of Jesus is already equivalent to the above miraculous scenarios, to Jesus’ healing people from the clouds, the 900-foot-tall Jesus, or Jesus at the White House. These are all supposed to be physical, filmable events, which thus have nothing to do with authentic spirituality.

As it came to establish itself from roughly the fourth century onwards, especially in the more evangelical West, Christianity took its creed to be about God incarnating himself in nature to heal the divide between people and their Creator. The key Christian events were supposed to be historical, not mythical, folkloric, or supernatural.

This is what distinguishes Christianity from the other religions. Western Christianity is proto-scientific in its preoccupation with establishing the Bible’s mere literal, historical truth and the alleged facts of what Jesus said and did, and with the need to have the correct beliefs rather than an enlightened perspective or spiritual character.

The other major monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, are also fixated on history, but the key difference is that they maintain a strict dichotomy between God and Creation, and thus between the sacred and the profane. Moses and Muhammad were just prophets, not God incarnate. For Jews and Muslims, God isn’t natural or historical, and to identify God with any part of the created world is idolatry.

Christians disagree, especially those who shaped the Church in the West, where these debates take place. But there’s only ever been a veneer of “Catholicism” or unanimity in Christian societies since Christians have always been profoundly divided.

Paul said that flesh cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and that only spiritual bodies can do so (1 Cor. 15:44, 50). According to the Gospel of Thomas (51),

His disciples said to him: “When will the resurrection of the dead take place, and when will the new world come?”

He said to them: “That resurrection which you are awaiting has already come, but you do not recognize it.”

Thus, for that Christian author, the resurrection wasn’t just a plain physical event, but was more like the result of a shift in perspective.

And for the Gnostics generally, identifying God with anything in the material world would be perverse because the Gnostic Christians indulged in Platonic, Eastern commentaries on the Jewish dichotomy. Nature is fallen or corrupting for the Gnostics, so God sent a savior to remind us that we don’t belong on the material plane. This natural world, which is ruled by the demiurge or a false God (or fallen angel), is samsara, an illusory, trickster realm that confuses and entraps us until we forget our divine origin and heroic potential. This is Orphism combined with Advaita Vedanta. It’s the heart of the perennial spiritual philosophy.

But the Gospel of John in the New Testament insists that Jesus’s resurrection was just a physical event: doubting Thomas touches the risen Jesus’s wounds (20:27). And the canonical Gospels generally depict Jesus as a character in history, as someone who’s born, who grows up, meets other people, teaches, heals, performs miracles that no one can explain, gets caught up in politics, and is executed for blasphemy and treason.

As far as conservative or defensive Christians are concerned, the New Testament writings triumphed over Gnosticism, but the division never went away. There are traces of Gnosticism in Paul’s epistles and in John, and Gnostic heresies persisted for centuries, passing into the modern world via secret societies, Jungian psychology, existential philosophy, and entertainments like the Lovecraftian mythos and “The Matrix.”

On top of that division, there’s the divide between Judaism and paganism, which Christianity has always awkwardly straddled. Christianity combines monotheism, the Jewish scriptures, and an emphasis on personal morality, on the one hand, with Greco-Roman polytheism, the dying and rising god mytheme, and a longing for imperialist, totalitarian thought control, on the other.

Remember how, according to Greek myths, Zeus turned himself into a shower of gold to impregnate the human princess Danaë, and how she gave birth to the heroic demigod Perseus? Or how Zeus turned himself into a swan to rape Leda, and how she, too, gave birth to the demigods, Helen and Pollux? Or how Zeus disguised himself as the human woman Alcmene’s husband, to impregnate her with his divine seed, producing the heroic demigod Heracles? And so on, since this was a mytheme of Greco-Roman lore.

Good. Now reread the New Testament’s stories of Jesus’s birth in Matthew or Luke, in which, as Luke has it, an angel tells the virgin Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (1:35). Now ask yourself whether the Christian nativity narrative sounds pagan or Jewish.

This division became historically crucial since Christianity was adopted not by Jews but by the Roman Empire under Constantine. Unlike in Islam, in which the founder Muhammad militarily secured his reforms of the Jahiliya (the age of ignorance for the Arabs), Christianity’s founder was brutally murdered by the empire that gave the Church the keys to the kingdom. If Jesus lived in history, he was likely closer to the Jewish Zealots or Essenes, who rejected Rome as evil, than to someone like Josephus or Eusebius, who collaborated with Rome.

The upshot is that if we’re wondering whether any evidence should convince a skeptic that Christianity is true, the confusion is due to Christianity’s incoherence. It’s not just, as PZ Myers says, that the New Testament doesn’t specifically predict that Jesus will one day arrive in a 900-foot-tall body. The deeper point is that there’s no such thing as Christianity.

Just as a skeptic can always prefer a natural explanation of any apparent miracle, a Christian can freely shift ground between Christianities, between the themes of literalism and neo-Gnosticism, Judaism and paganism, monotheism and polytheism, Eastern philosophical Christianity and shallow Western evangelicalism, Catholic unity and Protestant individualism, reason and faith, and so on and so on to tailor some sectarian interpretation to the available evidence.

This is what Eric Sentell does when he abandons the “classic” idea that God is all-powerful and all-knowing, for the “relational” view that God is essentially love. Thus, says Sentell, “Because love is inherently uncontrolling, God is also inherently uncontrolling. God can’t obstruct human free will because doing so violates His nature.”

Opting for a conception of God that entails that few miracles should be performed, Sentell can dismiss the criticism that God should be performing more miracles to convince skeptics. But that’s to say Sentell exploits the emptiness of “Christianity.”

Most importantly, though, the Christian or the skeptic can study religions more deeply to grasp the crassness not just of the notion of testing God by demanding miracles from him, but the Christian establishment’s literalism. Once you understand what religions are supposed to be doing, namely facilitating the acquisition of a transcendent (“spiritual” or existential) perspective on life and a practice that affirms that perspective, the question of why God doesn’t stoop to performing miracles for us seems as gross as the Christian’s boast that hers is the only correct religion.

There is no correctness or incorrectness with respect to a transcendent perspective. There’s only the brute shock of the epiphany, the peak state of consciousness or the “religious experience” that compels you to see through conventional delusions and all profane misunderstandings, and that haunts you ever afterward. Authentic spirituality is beyond good and evil, as Friedrich Nietzsche intuited.

If you must, you talk about this perspective and this meaning of life with fanciful myths because these matters are ineffable. You sense the noumenal mystery without being able to put your finger on it because the mammalian instincts and egoic concerns eventually get the better of us.

Language and reason evolved to help us organize and control mundane processes and survive in the natural environment. Religion is about seeing that whole endeavour as being like a tiny toy cabin in a snow globe, as something that seems trivial by comparison with a larger, more meaningful dimension.

So-called “theology” is inherently perverse since the notion that there could be a science or a logos of such transcendence is oxymoronic. The real problem here isn’t that skeptics are stubborn in rejecting all miracle claims. No, the problem is that Christianity’s miracle claims miss the point of religion.

Authentic religions employ metaphors to catalyze spiritual or existential experiences that bypass the critical mind and launch a private apocalypse. This is the end of the world that matters, the reality behind the pseudo-spiritual talk of a divine judgment of humanity on a date certain in history. What matters is personal enlightenment now, the elevation of the human to the transhuman, the philosophical understanding that the life we take for granted is an absurdity, and heroic courage and creativity are called for if we’re to carry on as the sages of the animal kingdom.

But the question of why God doesn’t do more to save us from hell is political, not genuinely religious. The Christian threat of hellfire is a political act, a tactic for scaring people into submission to the Church or Christendom. Yes, Jesus threatens hellfire in the four Gospels. But the vulgar Church chose to canonize those texts, rejecting the more esoteric and enlightened Gnostic ones that eschew such politics.

Unlike, say, America’s white Evangelical “Christians,” authentically religious people or the enlightened, philosophical, spiritual elites aren’t interested in corrupting their message by marrying it to a political institution. They form secret societies to preserve the revelation that theophanies or entheogenic states of consciousness are possible. Those who don’t have ears to hear are left alone until they’re ready, or their antics are used for comic relief.

The Western kind of Christianity that’s the elephant in the room here was a scam from the beginning. According to the foundational story, the character of Jesus was betrayed not just by Rome but by Jewish “hypocrites,” by unenlightened Jews who followed the letter of the law without understanding its connection to perennial spirituality.

In that respect, Christianity is comparable to Judaism in that Jewish monotheism was read back into the scriptures from the benefit of hindsight, by a Persian-inspired priestly class that repudiated the more grassroots polytheism of the Israelites. Similarly, the gospel narratives were sanitized for Catholic purposes or were selected to overshadow and oversimplify the inner, Gnostic, perennial revelation for vulgar consumption. Rome’s state religion had to be vulgar to provide pseudo-spiritual cover for Rome’s imperialism.

However, the difference between the Jewish and Christian shenanigans is that Jews were on the bottom for most of their history, whereas Christians were on top. Christians dominated, and Jews were dominated, so the politicization of Christianity offends as a distortion of our existential purpose. By contrast, Jews had to be religiously creative to keep their culture alive and weren’t inclined to impose their totalitarian law onto other cultures in the way that foreigners oppressed Jews.

I’ll close by returning to the question of whether the skeptic should convert to Christianity if she sees something like Jesus descending from the clouds and performing miracles.

The witness might be shocked into doing so by the strangeness of such an event, but that wouldn’t make her a Christian, not if Christianity is supposed to be a real religion. This skeptic would thereby only be joining a club that’s lost its political power in the modern age, but that might regain it by taking ownership of such an apparent miracle that’s spiritually irrelevant. None of those power games is crucial to the perennial religious insights, which are forefront in the Indian religions, and which Western Christianity exchanged for the politics of running the collapsing Roman Empire.

Again, real religion gives you a profound take on life and a therapy or a practice to deal with the revelation. That’s all. Only Western Christians are obsessed both with spreading and apologizing for their faith because they’ve reduced spiritual matters to the alleged literal truths of historical events and political opportunities, which is to say they’ve reduced them to superficialities.

Against those Orwellian debasements, religion and philosophy require us to see deeper, to put the literal into a more meaningful context, not just with empty words or pseudoscientific discourses, but with ennobling experience.